E-books are a hot topic in the publishing
world. Since I receive a number of inquiries regarding
them, I thought I would post a recent article from ZDNet
News.

Is your work suitable for an e-book or e-publishing?
Read this article on e-books and I'll add my own comments
at the end.

First, though, some basic definitions. Essentially,
"e-publishing" is when you have your book
online to be downloaded onto a user's computer. These
books are stored online until someone downloads them to
be read at their leisure. An "e-book" on the
other hand, is an electronic book that can be read with a
special hand-held computer, although they can also be
read on a regular sized computer.

Johann Gutenberg, the inventor of the
printing press, never received the kind of adulation from
his 15th-century contemporaries that his invention
garnered from later generations.

By the same token, the arrival of the
innovative technologies opening the way for electronic
books is going to be appreciated more by later adopters
than by the current generation of book lovers.

Not that its proponents -- with Microsoft
playing the role of drum major -- aren't giving it the
old college try. Along with Barnes & Noble, the giant
software maker is making a big splash to convince book
lovers that it can deliver an on-screen reading
experience that approaches reading text on paper.

But even the best public relations effort
is going to fall short for one simple reason: The
technology isn't ready for prime time.

The Microsoft Reader is still only
available for desktop and laptop computers. Because of a
glitch, the release of a version of the Reader for
PocketPC owners supporting e-books isn't going to be
immediately available.

And even if it were available, what would
really change? Is anybody really up for an all-nighter
reading "Moby Dick" on a handheld? How about a
laptop or desktop? I don't know about you, but slugging
through the saga of Captain Ahab and the great white
whale -- sitting bolt upright in front of a screen,
paging through all that text, mouse click by mouse click
-- isn't my idea of a wow evening.

On the Horizon

And yet all these halfway steps are well
worth the effort because, ultimately, the potential of
electronic books is going to live up to the promise.

I'm fond of the e-book idea for another
reason: It represents the end of the veritable death
penalty on scholarly and specialized works. Book
retailers prefer to sell formulaic tomes targeted at a
popular audience. Hey, these guys can't sell enough
Danielle Steel, but good luck finding an updated version
of Oswald Spengler's "Decline of the West,"
which was published in 1922.

All that goes by the by when e-books
become a reality. Since the content will be in digital
form, inventory considerations are no longer going to
determine who lives and who dies.

What you need to make this happen is a
lightweight, low-cost and durable tablet-size device that
displays text that is close in quality to a book.

Microsoft is working on such a device. In
fact, the company offered a sneak peek of a prototype to
reporters at its Microsoft .Net briefing earlier this
summer. But that project remains a work in progress, and
the company remains far from releasing a commercial
version of the product for delivery to the market.

A similar idea has been kicked around at
Sun Microsystems. More than a year ago, Bob Glass, who
then directed the company's science office, showed me a
video depicting a newspaper tablet, replete with wireless
and multimedia hyperlinks. Sure, it was closer to Flash
Gordon than reality. But the general theme --
portability, multimedia and crisp text -- echoed the one
sounded by Microsoft.

The exciting news is that the industry is
groping toward this still uncertain, intriguing future.
And it's only a matter of time before somebody gets it
right.

--by Charles Cooper,
ZDNet News

My Thoughts

So is e-publishing right for your book? If you're writing
fiction, then I don't think so. Fiction is often best
enjoyed curled up in front of a crackling fire on a rainy
day. It's hard to imagine that we'll be enjoying a good
computer hand-held any time soon in the same way we enjoy
a good paperback book. That's not to say it won't happen,
I just feel there are a lot of improvements needed before
we all start walking around with Star-Trek style mini-readers. There are actually explorations into developing
rewriteable books that are essentially Etch-a-Sketches;
you plug them into a computer and the new text is
downloaded into the "book" and the "text"
on the page rewrites itself.

E-publishing does give a
writer one more avenue to use and one can never have too
many of those. This is particularly true if you are a
self-publisher. In addition to selling your paper book,
you can have your book online at minimal cost and offer
this as just one more way to sell your book. This may
also appeal to certain authors who will have technically
oriented audiences (such as authors of techno thrillers).
Such audiences will be more inclined to read books on
their computer screens.

Also, if you're a self-published
author--but what you are really interested in is moving
into traditional publishing (because you've gotten one
too many rejections and want to prove these haughty
publishers wrong)--then e-publishing can give you an
inexpensive way to test the waters and show prospective
publishers that you do, in fact, have a viable book.

However, if you are
writing a non-fiction book, with an admitted small
following, then it could be a very good idea to e-publish.
This can be especially good for engineers, doctors,
educators, and so forth that will have a fairly limited
audience.

The important thing,
though, is to choose markets that are appropriate for your
book.

Contact Information
If you would like additional information or have any questions,
please feel free to contact me by e-mail at: bookdr*wvi.com.
Make sure you replace the asterisk with an "@". (This helps avoid overloading my inbox with spam.)